Weekly transmissions from our shared future.

This Is Your Brain on Technology

What happens to our brains and our psyche when a huge portion of humanity spends their lives persistently jacked in to their computers, their tablets, their smartphones, their screens? We don’t really know—in a sense, we’re performing one massive uncontrolled experiment on most of the developed world.

This week, we’ve been exploring everything mankind knows about the brain and technology’s effect on it. Nathalie Nahai, the “web psychologist,” has been doing this for her career. She’s researchers how the web changes our expectations, our behavior, our attention spans, and our mood. Later this month, she’ll be hosting the “Humanise the Web” conference in London, where she and other experts will be exploring our connection with the internet and how, maybe, we can make it a little more like the real world.